What’s Monte Verità all about?:
The second story in Daphne du Maurier’s collection focuses on a mysterious mountain cult who are promised immortality but there is a price to pay.
What did I think?:
Oh my goodness, that was a slog and a half. Let’s get this straight, Daphne du Maurier is one of my all time favourite authors but with Monte Verità, she might have just proved to me that you’re not necessarily going to love everything that your favourite author writes! The second story in this collection is more like a novella, it’s about sixty pages long and, to be honest, I could feel every single one of those pages dragging along. It started off promisingly enough and I was quite excited to see where the author was going to take it but I was sorely disappointed by the end. It felt more like an epic saga of a story – which, I would normally be well up for but something just didn’t sit right with me. Perhaps it was the length, perhaps it was a bit too airy-fairy for me who can say? All I do know is that I was quite relieved when I (eventually) came to the end.
There is a lot going on in this story, a huge amount and I don’t want to go into the plot too much for fear of my review turning into as much of an rigmarole as the story itself! Basically, it involves a strange mountain in Europe (we are not told exactly where) called Monte Verità that hosts on its very summit, a perplexing cult that the surrounding villages are terrified of. This is because once their daughters hit the age of thirteen they have the potential to be “called” to the mountain where they are never seen again.
The narrative follows our unnamed narrator, his friend Victor and his new wife Anna and their dealings with the mountain. Anna has always seemed to have a certain kind of stillness, serenity and restlessness, almost like she is continually looking for something. Well, when she deigns to climb Monte Verità with her keen mountaineer husband Victor, she finds out exactly what she is looking for and that is to join the cult at the summit. The story follows our narrator as he listens to what has happened from Victor whom in the middle of a nervous breakdown and then our narrator attempts to ascend the mountain and get some answers for himself.
Sounds brilliant right? Just the sort of intriguing premise to pull you in? Not for me, unfortunately. I was fascinated at the start mind you, and was thoroughly enjoying it until Anna went up the mountain. After that, everything just fell slightly flat for me. I don’t think we found out enough about the people who lived at the summit i.e. how they lived, what they believed in and the secret of their apparent immortality and the story-line in general from this point just got slightly wishy-washy and vague which irritated me to no end! I’m not sure what I was expecting when I first starting reading the story but I certainly didn’t get it and am quite surprised about this as I think it had the potential to be taken in a more darker direction which may have swayed my opinion to a more positive review. I’m sure there’s people out there that would still love this story, this is simply my personal opinion but Daphne, it wasn’t one of your best!
Would I recommend it?:
Probably not.
Star rating (out of 5):
NEXT SHORT STORY: The Murders In The Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe from the collection The Best Short Stories Of Edgar Allan Poe.
